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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9540705" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>They come up in SF RPGing. Eg when the PCs in my Traveller game were using their triple beam laser to melt through 4 km of ice to the alien installation buried beneath it, we - the game participants - Google up and quickly reviewed a scientific paper on the use of lasers to melt ice, in order to form a reasonable conjecture as to how long it would take.</p><p></p><p>When, in the same game, I was using my adaptation of a published module - <a href="https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2023/04/retrospective-shadows.html" target="_blank">Shadows</a> - I gave a description of some technical effect that is found in the adventure, and the electrical engineer at my table groaned, face-palmed, but then allowed me to go on.</p><p></p><p>Whereas in a fantasy RPG, I wouldn't expect the same sort of response, because the fiction doesn't purport to be grounded in scientific reality and expressive of scientific possibility.</p><p></p><p>I'm talking about the setting(s) that D&D presupposes and encourages - a setting which includes flying dragons, giant terrestrial arthropods, and other impossible creatures; elemental planes, positive and negative material / energy planes, planes of infinite extent which can nevertheless be traversed to their boundaries in finite time travelling at finite speed; magically-powered perpetual motion machines; etc</p><p></p><p>These features entail that the reality of D&D worlds is not the physical reality of our real world.</p><p></p><p>Furthermore, the setting(s) that D&D presupposes and encourages incorporate features - like gods of diseases and of earthquakes; evil spirits and hauntings; etc - that strongly imply non-scientific explanations for various phenomena that <em>actually</em> (in the real world) have naturalistic explanations, but have been taken by many human beings to have supernatural explanations. D&D worlds appear to incorporate these sorts of supernatural explanations.</p><p></p><p>I summarise all this by saying physics is not a default for D&D worlds.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9540705, member: 42582"] They come up in SF RPGing. Eg when the PCs in my Traveller game were using their triple beam laser to melt through 4 km of ice to the alien installation buried beneath it, we - the game participants - Google up and quickly reviewed a scientific paper on the use of lasers to melt ice, in order to form a reasonable conjecture as to how long it would take. When, in the same game, I was using my adaptation of a published module - [url=https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2023/04/retrospective-shadows.html]Shadows[/url] - I gave a description of some technical effect that is found in the adventure, and the electrical engineer at my table groaned, face-palmed, but then allowed me to go on. Whereas in a fantasy RPG, I wouldn't expect the same sort of response, because the fiction doesn't purport to be grounded in scientific reality and expressive of scientific possibility. I'm talking about the setting(s) that D&D presupposes and encourages - a setting which includes flying dragons, giant terrestrial arthropods, and other impossible creatures; elemental planes, positive and negative material / energy planes, planes of infinite extent which can nevertheless be traversed to their boundaries in finite time travelling at finite speed; magically-powered perpetual motion machines; etc These features entail that the reality of D&D worlds is not the physical reality of our real world. Furthermore, the setting(s) that D&D presupposes and encourages incorporate features - like gods of diseases and of earthquakes; evil spirits and hauntings; etc - that strongly imply non-scientific explanations for various phenomena that [I]actually[/I] (in the real world) have naturalistic explanations, but have been taken by many human beings to have supernatural explanations. D&D worlds appear to incorporate these sorts of supernatural explanations. I summarise all this by saying physics is not a default for D&D worlds. [/QUOTE]
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